


This is Us

by KallanEboi



Series: These are the things that are strange and yet somehow normal [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, M/M, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-08
Updated: 2012-05-08
Packaged: 2017-11-05 00:59:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/400166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KallanEboi/pseuds/KallanEboi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Violence occurs in a dream and also in relation to a body.)</p><p>John has nightmares. Sherlock decides that John is his area.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is Us

**Author's Note:**

> Part two of the "These are the things that are strange and yet somehow normal" series. Can be read separately, but it'll make more sense if you read the first part.

Noise. Motion.

Another body next to me. 

_Get moving._

I’m out of bed and two steps away before I manage to stop myself. I’m not in my room; I’m in Sherlock’s. Sherlock. Flatmate. Plays violin. Deduces people. (Right old arse, sometimes.) Calmed me until I fell asleep last night.

I turn around.

“Good morning,” he says, watching me from where he’s sitting up on the bed. “Did you sleep well?”

“Yeah,” I reply. “Yeah, I did.” I swallow, suddenly nervous. “Thank you for last night.”

He waves a hand, as if dismissing my gratitude. “You were distressed, I calmed you down.”

Is that all it was?

“Right,” I say, and turn on my heel to go shower. 

“You’re welcome, John,” he says to my back before I’ve even take two steps. “That’s the response you wanted, right? ‘You’re welcome?’ Or I could have said, ‘It was no problem,’ because it wasn’t.” I turn back around, surprised. “This isn’t my area, John, I told you that. I don’t know what the etiquette is for this.”

“I don’t quite know either,” I admit. Here, in the light of day, I feel kind of ashamed about last night. They were just nightmares. I’m a grown man. 

“You were startled when you realised there was someone else with you in bed,” Sherlock observes, watching me. “But you’re calm now.”

“Getting there, at any rate,” I say. “It’s been...awhile since I’ve had someone else in bed with me.” 

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he replies. 

“I know.” I did. I know he didn’t mean to. It wasn’t his fault, it was mine. Is mine. “Breakfast?” He nods, and I turn and leave.

The day passes in a haze of drowsy laziness. Neither of us had gotten much sleep, and although Sherlock seemed to able function completely on tea and nicotine patches, he seems rather content to watch television on the couch with me.

With his head in my lap.

We are midway through the second movie when I find my hand running through his hair, much the same as he had done to me last night. 

“Sorry,” I mutter, pulling my hand away.

“Don’t,” Sherlock says, grabbing my wrist before I can pull it away. He places it back on his head. I tentatively start stroking again. He... nuzzles (there is no other word for it) into my hand and then rests his head more firmly on my thigh.

“What is this, Sherlock?” I ask later, after lunch when we’re back on the couch, his head in my lap again. He is staring at the ceiling with his hands folded under his chin, ignoring the television.

“This is us, John,” he replies.

“All right,” I say, and stroke through his curls again. 

That night, I go to my own bed later than I normally do, alone. I can hear Sherlock downstairs, doing something in the kitchen, and then faint music from his laptop. I fall asleep to the soft noises.

_I’ve got blood up to my wrists. It’s a boy, this time an actual boy, a local child who couldn’t be more than fifteen and who had been caught in the crossfire and taken shrapnel to his back. He’s barely breathing, and we’re exposed. I pick him up gently and get us behind a mostly-whole wall of a nearby house. He’s muttering something, breathless, his voice breaking, and I catch the words for mother and sister, but everything else is blurred out._

_His voice grows softer and then, all of a sudden, he’s gone._

_“John!” someone’s calling, and someone grabs my_ shoulder and I lash out instinctively. “John, let me go.”

Calm voice, cool, deep, authoritative. Called me by my first name. I’m holding a wrist, attached to the arm that is twisted up behind the back of my flatmate. Who is pushed against the wall. 

I’m holding him there.

“I’m sorry,” I say, immediately letting go. I look at my own hands, the afterimages of the boy’s blood coating my hands ghosting in front of me. I blink and the image fades and I put my hands resolutely behind my back. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” Sherlock says, but I can see the red mark my hand made around his wrist. He follows my gaze and pulls the cuff of his shirt over it. “I’m all right. Lestrade called.”

“What’s he want? What time is it?”

“It’s half seven. They’ve found a body near the Thames, by Tower Bridge. Come on,” he replies, heading for my bedroom door. “He wants us to meet him at the morgue.” 

I have just enough time for tea and toast before I’m following Sherlock out the door and we’re on our way. 

“I’ve got to get back to the scene, call me with what you find,” Lestrade says as we pass him in the corridor heading for the morgue. “Apparently they’ve found another body.”

The body is a boy, no older than fifteen, and his back has been sliced open. I can see his spinal cord from where I’m standing at the doorway. I remember the dream, the blood on my hands, and gasp. 

“Yes, Molly, coffee would be lovely,” Sherlock says. Molly moves past me, and Sherlock looks up at me. I’m frozen in place.

“John,” he says, and he’s in front of me, stooping to look me in the eye. He’s grasped my hands, which I’d raised to look at, intertwining his fingers with my own. His fingers are long, bony. “John.”

“What?” I reply, finally finding my own voice. Jesus, they’re just nightmares. It’s daytime, this is London. (But the boy is so young.)

“Look at me,” Sherlock commands, and I do, tearing my eyes away from the prone figure lying face down on the table. “You’re safe.”

“I am not a child,” I say, surprised at the vehemence in my own voice. He pushes our linked hands down but doesn’t relinquish my fingers.

“I never said you were, John,” he replies. “You’re not weak, either. What is it about this particular body?”

I swallow around a suddenly dry throat. He waits, more patient than I’ve ever seen him, for me to answer him. “The wounds,” I finally manage. “There was a boy who died in my arms. I could see his spine.” Bones aren’t white in a live body. 

Sherlock studies my face. I have no idea what he’s seeing and I frankly don’t care. But I feel steadier, watching him examine me, anchored by our linked hands.

“Molly’s coming,” he says suddenly, and lets me go. He tugs on my shoulder, dragging me over to the body. I’m not panicked anymore, and I study the wounds.

“Most of these were accidental,” I say.

“How can you tell?” Sherlock asks. He knows. He just wants to hear me go through it.

“They’re too random, too jagged. The biggest wound,” I say, indicating the one along the boy’s spine, “is deliberate. A knife or scalpel.”

“Good,” Sherlock says, and Molly opens the door to see us both bending over the body.

“Find anything?” she asks, setting the coffees on a table, well away from everything else.

“Quite a lot,” Sherlock replies. He picks up both coffees and hands one to me. I look askance at Molly, who nods that the coffee is for me. Sherlock taps out something on his phone as I sip. His phone starts dinging madly, a cacophony of different text tones. He grins and grabs my arm, towing me out. 

We’re back on the street before I quite realise what’s going on. Sherlock is on the phone with Lestrade, saying something about black market organ harvesting and a recent kidnapping. He gives an address to Lestrade, telling him to look there.

“Where are we going?” I ask. 

“We are going home,” he replies. “This was barely worth my time.” He’s frustrated. 

“How’d you know?” Organ harvesting? Really? Did that sort of thing still happen?

“The boy’s kidneys were missing. It was very clumsily done, and the other wounds were a distraction.”

“But there wasn’t a wound by his kidneys,” I say, confused.

“There was,” Sherlock replies. “They’d closed it with glue so the seam was nearly invisible, which argues that the person who’d done it had some medical training.”

“And the address you gave Lestrade?”

“Homeless network reported some things that suddenly added up.”

“Ah,” I say. He falls silent and the city scrolls past the window of the cab. I study my hands again, the dual memories of the boy’s blood and Sherlock’s fingers playing in my head. 

“Have you hurt your hands?” Sherlock asks. The solicitousness surprises me. 

“No,” I reply, curling my fingers in and tucking them resolutely under my folded arms.

“You had another nightmare last night,” Sherlock says after a few moments of silence. 

“It happens,” I say, shrugging. 

“So you’ve said before,” he says, and I realise I’ve given him the same reply I’d given when I’d woken up the night before last.

“And?” I ask, bracing for more questions.

“I just wanted to know,” he replies, and settles back into the seat of the cab.

It’s delivery Chinese and more television that night, both of us settled on the sofa with our laptops. I’m trying to write up a blog entry and he’s doing...something. It appears to involve looking at autopsy photos. I don’t ask, and don’t look. 

“I meant what I said last night,” he says, breaking the silence. I jump. I’d been staring at my blog, watching the blinking cursor mock me. 

“Which part?” I ask, scrambling to try to get some context.

“You don’t fall under the ‘not my area’ thing,” he says. 

Oh. That part. I’d begun to wonder if I’d dreamed that part.

He shuts his laptop and places it under the sofa, out of harm’s way. I look over at him, and he’s suddenly in my space, close enough that I can feel his exhale on my cheek.

“Is this okay?” he asks, voice low.

“Yeah,” I reply, and then his lips meet mine. He’s gentle, which surprises me, and the kiss is almost chaste. Almost.

“Is this what you want?” he asks when we part.

I close my own laptop, not bothering to power it down properly, and set it aside. “Yes,” I reply. He leans forward again, and I put a hand on his chest, stopping him but not pushing him away. “Are you sure this is what you want? This isn’t an experiment, or some kind of test?”

“Yes, I’m sure, and no, this isn’t,” he says.

I knot my fingers into his shirt and pull him forward. He gasps a bit in surprise, but lets me, and I tilt my head to allow for the height difference. Our kiss this time is heated, less tentative. I feel his tongue trace my bottom lip and I part my lips, allowing him access. 

He tastes like salt and beef, remnants of his takeaway, but there’s something underneath that’s uniquely him. He shifts on the couch so we’re sitting closer, facing each other more, and winds the fingers of his right hand into my hair, stroking it gently. 

He kisses like he observes: comprehensively, and then the minor details. Broad movements turn into smaller ones, tracing my top lip, a small hint of teeth on the bottom one, tickling my tongue with his. His mouth is slightly cooler than my own, which surprises me, a small detail I file away for later. I’m learning him as he’s learning me, a thought that almost makes me smile. My right hand threads into his hair, traces the shell of his ear and the trails down the sensitive skin just behind it. He shudders and grunts in surprise, and I do smile then.

“You are surprising,” he says, pulling away just enough to speak. I cup one hand around his jaw. I trail my fingers down that spot again, and he smiles, a genuinely happy look that I’d never seen before. He cups my jaw and kisses me again, gently, just a soft brush of lips. It’s tender, a word I never thought I would be able to apply to Sherlock Holmes.

“I do try,” I reply, just a bit breathless, and then I yawn involuntarily. The lack of sleep from the night before last, the late night last night, and the early morning this morning are hitting me all at once. 

“Let’s go to bed,” he says, pulling me up and leading me to his room. 

I wonder, as we’re going to his room, if this is going to go any farther tonight. I decide to follow his lead, and climb into bed beside him.

**Author's Note:**

> Rating may change with later parts.


End file.
